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EXHIBITION OF PAINTINGS 
by 


CHILDE HASSAM 


OPENING 
January 25, 1926 


HOUSE OF DURAND-RUEL 
12 EAST 57TH STREET 


NEW YORK CITY 





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-CHILDE HASSAM IN RETROSPECT 





HE House of Durand-Ruel has 
rarely exhibited Americans. 
That their choice should now fall on 
Childe Hassam 1s natural, for no 
American painter more consistently 
and ably represents that tradition of 
impressionism for which the house has 
ever valiantly done battle. Childe 
Hassam’s pictures seem sufficiently at 
home on walls where we are accus- 
tomed to seeing Monet, Pissarro, Sisley 
and Renoir. The earliest pictures are 
Breis20, the latest is of. last year. 
In 1892, Childe Hassam, thirty- 
three years old, received the most 
coveted international award of the 
moment, the gold medal at Munich. 
Three years earlier he had been a 
medallist of the Salon, beginning of 
professional honors, that have only 
slackened when there were no more 


[5] 


to win. Except John Sargent, no 
other American painter has been so 
frequently and highly honored by his 
fellow artists. Such tributes properly 
go to virtuosity. It was so in Sar- 
gent’s case; it 1s so in Hassam’s. My 
delicate task is that of disengaging the 
artist from the virtuoso. 

For virtuosity is a mask. You get 
the essential artist, the man of thought 
and feeling behind the virtuoso, only 
in moments when disarmed by won- 
der or devotion he forgets his skill 
and himself as skilful. Whoever has 
seen Pachmann sink himself in Chopin 
knows what I mean. Great thinkers 
among artists have studied this dilem- 
ma of virtuosity, arriving at the 
formula that the artist is most fortu- 
nate whose skill is ever a little below 
what he has to say. Such is the mean- 
ing of Leonardo’s profound saying 
that “the judgment should surpass the 
work.” Evidently the virtuoso is de- 


[6] 


nied this ideal condition of an ascend- 
ing but never fulfilled endeavor. His 
skill is habitually in excess of what he 
has to say, and we get him at his best 
when work and judgment are in exact 
equilibrium. It is the quest and dis- 
covery of these moments that has 
kept vivid my interest and curiosity 
towards Hassam’s work despite its 
apparently uniform skill. 

We come near his beginnings 1n a 
little oil study of himself in his studio 
and in a café scene in gouache, both 
of 1892. Already Hassam had had the 
sound executive discipline of maga- 
zine illustration in the golden years of 
that genre in America. Who his early 
masters were in Boston and NewYork, 
he does not tell us. Probably he owed 

little to them. We see, however, in 
~ the little studio interior that he had 
well mastered the unctuous and som- 
bre harmonies which we associate 
with Chase, Carolus and Duveneck, 


Ee | 


while in the café scene, crisp and 
blondly bleak and characterful, his 
interest is already turned to the new 
problems of natural illumination. 
The little watercolor is prophetic. 
One has only to enrich its simple, 
well-balanced surfaces with the new 
devices of broken color to find the 
Hassam we all know. In adopting the 
new technique, he avoided the ex- 
tremes of the luminist point of view. 
Sensitively curious of effects of light, 
he paints not illumination in the ab- 
stract, but illuminated objects, retain- 
ing, against the vogue for sheer irra- 
diation, the habit of fine descriptive 
draughtsmanship. We have a very 
accomplished example of the new 
manner in the large nocturne of 1898, 
withsoftly glowing paper lanterns,pale 
green and orange red,—mysterious 
luminaries before which stands both 
gently and sharply a girl’s slight form. 
The picture has the double charm of 


[8 ] 


being a careful invention in the vein 
of Sargent’s famous fantasia while 
keeping the unexpectedness of a mere 
discovery. The decorative quality of 
the design again forecasts a merit 
which was to be a saving grace of 
much painting that otherwise might 
have seemed merely dextrous. This 
was about the moment of the little 
marines from the Isles of Shoals; still, 
in my opinion, Hassam’s masterpieces 
is the vein of naturalistic luminism. 
I miss them in this show, though we 
have a technical equivalent in two 
later and more sophisticated sea pieces 
with nude figures. 

For the creator of this nocturne and 
of the Appledore marines the notation 
of light could have few difficulties in 
_ reserve. Hassam could followthe light 
where it led, noting as readily the 
looming of sierras beyond mist veils, 
the subtle dapplings anddiscolorations 
of the nude in the universal light or 


eo") 


the confined and variously reflected 
light of wood or house interior, the 
rising of white towns beyond steely 
blue harbors bearing white sails 
lightly, the snapping polychromy of 
war flags above crowded avenues, the 
proud upthrust of sky-scrapers from 
huddles of old roofs and gables. 

The just reasons for Hassam’s 
admitted primacy among our painters 
of impressionist tendency should 
now be clear. He came early to 
novel tasks congenial to his own 
spiritand interesting to the enlightened 
public. By thoroughly mastering his 
task, he attained a specialist’s prestige, 
for the good reason that his numer- 
ous competitors in an increasingly 
crowded specialty did the task less 
well than he. Indeed, even in the 
aspect that transcends professional- 
ism, I think of only Twachtman and 
Alden Weiras habitually putting more 
artistry into work of this sort. Among 


[10] 


the host of competent American 
impressionists, Childe Hassam stands 
forth as much by reason of his occa- 
sional rare artistry as by reason of his 
unflagging virtuosity. 

To the discriminating visitor I leave 
the rewarding task of catching the 
virtuoso off his guard, recording only 
a few discoveries of my own. I think 
that Hassam is most the artist when 
impelled by emotions antedating pro- 
fessional interests. Imagine the long 
thoughts of a Boston lad of most sen- 
sitive vision who found in the homely 
picturesqueness of old Boston and the 
North Shore towns, in their dignity 
and slightly shabby dearness, the key 
to this kind of charm everywhere. 
You have the full quality of the feel- 
ing in the alien, spectral sky-scraper 
reconciled with environing old roofs 
by densely falling snow; you have had 
it in earlier scenes of Paris and New 
York which are vivid to me after a 


[11] 


generation; you have it in the paint- 
ing about Lyme, in the etchings of old 
Portsmouth and Easthampton; you 
have the emotion in consummate 
epitome in the watercolor drawing, 
“Court Street, Portsmouth.” 
Merely for its mastery of concise 
indication I should like to see it hung 
between the most summary and hand- 
some Marin and Cézanne that could 
be found. More important is the sense 
it yields instantaneously of a lovable 
old mansion in its tranquil setting. 
Here for me is the essential and im- 
portant artist, but as I close the form- 
ula there come before me surprises in 
work that usually reaches only a cold 
sort of approval within me. I am 
thinking of a singular nobility in what 
is superficially considered only one of 
many experiments of the nude in in- 
terior light. “Against the Light” is the 
title, suggesting only an experimental 
intention. How near it is to the old 


[12] 


Beaux-arts nobility, yet with what a 
saving difference! I can’t explain it, 
but I feel it, and it reminds me that 
even the most reasonable formulas 
hardly cover any considerable talent, 
much less can they cover those happy 
episodes when a great talent unex- 
pectedly becomes genius. 


FRANK JEWETT MATHER, JR. 





New York, January 11, 1926 
Dear Hassam: 


I feel that in your coming exhibition at Durand- 
Ruel’s, having had the privilege of seeing your as- 
sembled work that is to be shown, the words of the 
great French artist’ America has had a Renaissance 
in Art as great as that of the Italian Renaissance 
only the American people do not know it yet,” will 
be verified, and I trust that the exhibition will open 
American eyes to the truth expressed by the French 
artist. To me the artist’s words seem very true, but I 
feel to go further than he did, for somehow the fresh- 
ness, originality, beauty and purity in the work of the 
great group of our artists in the latter half of the 
nineteenth century, and the surviving membersof that 
group until the present time, would lead one back 


through the centuries to the clear beauty in Greek 


Art. 
[13] 


The Italian Renaissance was burdened with deco- 
ration, the American Renaissance portrays nature 
and has more of the beautiful simplicity of the Greek. 

It seems to me that no painter’s brush has more 
truly met the command recorded in the Book of 
Genesis “Let there be light” than yours. This you 
have done with truth and charm and poetry, and I 
think that you, who are perhaps the youngest of the 
group, will always be remembered as among the great 
and leading men honored by the French artist’s words. 

You have expressed yourself so well in the pictures 
shimmering with light and poetic truth, and I realize 
that your skill in handling enduring color assures a 
permanence in beauty that will endure for as long 
time as have the masterpieces of the fifteenth century. 

Believe me with keen appreciation and true ad- 
miration, 

Very sincerely yours, 


Joun GELLATLY 





Childe Hassam est tout naturellement peintre color- 
iste comme il n’y en a peu, sa facture vous donne 
toujours de la belle matiére, soit des lavis mince de 
couleur ou une pate solide. Son dessin comme tous les 
maitres coule de source c’est de l’inspiration de la 
lumiére, combiné avec une variété de composition sans 
egale, il est surement de son temps un moderne un 
des maitres modernes. Que l’on regarde ses oeuvres a 
Vhuile, 4 eau au pastel, eau forte ou dessin c’est 
toujours Hassam un luministe. 

LE Cog DE LAUTREPPE 
[ édité par P.V.V.] 


[14] 


. 


PAINTINGS 
EXHIBITION 








. The New York Winter Window 


48% x 58 — 1919 


. Looking into the Little South Room, East 


Hampton 
488. x 584% — 1917 


3. The Portrait and the Bust 
37 % x 413% — 1920 
4. The Opal 
35q5 x 1834 — 1905 
5. The Room of Flowers 


343% x 3434 — 1894 
Celia Thaxter’s salon at Appledore, Isles of Shoals. 
A room filled with flowers and most everything else, 
from a Grand Rapids rocking chair to the most ex- 
quisite Venetian glass vases and period pieces of 
Colonial furniture. 


. Against the Light 


39% x 22% — 1916 


. Miss Ingram Reading a Letter 


32% x 195 — 1913 


. The Sun Room 


57% x 44 — 1999 


9. Posilippo 
2534 x 203 — 1897 
10. Naples 
25% x 3034 — 1897 
11. Vesuvius 


25% x 3034 — 1897 


[16] 


12. 


13. 


14. 


15. 


16. 


By fe 


18. 


19. 


20. 


21. 


22. 


Phryne 
13% x 13834 — 1912 


Portrait in the Park 
13 x 15 — 1890 


Portrait Out of Doors, Miss W. 
38% x 38 — 1909 


Portrait at a New York Window 
36% x 25% — 1921 


Gloucester 
245% x 22% — 1899 


Pierce’s Stable 
| 29% x 23% — 1900 
Low wooden buildings that extended at the time on 
7th Avenue and 58th Street. 


July Night 
37% x 31,8, — 1898 
The Purple Trail (Motor Parkway, Long Island) 


21% x 304% — 1925 


The Beyrl Pool 
24% x 20% — 1912 


The Window at Appledore 
30 x 33% — 1910 


June 26th, Old Lyme 
31% x 25% — 1912 
Portrait of Mrs. Hassam in the South East room at 
Miss Florence’s, Old Lyme, on her birthday in 
June. The flowers in their prime on this date are the 
Mountain Laurel—Kalmia. Peter Kalm thought 
it the most beautiful of North American flowers. 


[a7 


23. The Flower Shop 
36% x 28% — 1893 
At the apex of where the Flatiron Building now 
stands there was a little flower shop that one could 
step across in a few strides from Fifth Avenue to 
Broadway. Broadway is seen through the window 
with the sign lettering reversed on the window glass. 


24. Pomona in the Rose Bower 
27% x 19% — 1919 


25. The Beyrl Gorge 
241 x 20% — 1912 


26. Self Portrait 
16 x 123 — 1898 


[18] 





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